Analyzing a "vast amount of food waste" discovered during a dig at the kitchen in Durham Cathedral, archaeologists have recreated the diet of the monks and other people who lived there over the centuries (app. 14th cent - Second World War).
According to The Journal (2014), "fish would have been an important part of the religious order’s diet, and the finds showed that the monks were eating North Sea cod, herring, sole, turbot, and salmon and trout from the River Wear."
Other menu items included "'white meat' calves" and "a wide range of birds" that ranged "from domestic fowl to game and wild birds from the estuaries and moors of the region." The monks may have also eaten puffins and lapwing.
Comment: This menu is necessarily incomplete because things like fruit, vegetables, bread, etc., wouldn't have been preserved after so many years, but it sounds to me like these monks and the other inhabitants of the castle ate better than most people do today. Their food was undoubtedly more healthy than today's diet of sugar-coated lard and processed "meat products" saturated with preservatives, artificial flavoring and other toxic waste.
Note: "Durham Cathedral was built in the late 11th and early 12th centuries to house the relics of St Cuthbert (evangelizer of Northumbria) and the Venerable Bede. It attests to the importance of the early Benedictine monastic community and is the largest and finest example of Norman architecture in England. The innovative audacity of its vaulting foreshadowed Gothic architecture. Behind the cathedral stands the castle, an ancient Norman fortress which was the residence of the prince-bishops of Durham." Source: UNESCO World Heritage List.
"'Arguably the most distinctive feature of the early Christian literature,' writes Bart Ehrman, 'is the degree to which it was forged.' The Homilies and Recognitions of Clement; Paul's letters to and from Seneca; Gospels by Peter, Thomas, and Philip; Jesus' correspondence with Abgar, letters by Peter and Paul in the New Testament--all forgeries. To cite just a few examples." Source: Oxford University Press (OUP).
Comment: I haven't read the particular book reviewed in this OUP article, but I did read Forged, another book by Ehrman which covers a lot of the same ground, and it's excellent. Highly recommended. My only problem with Ehrman is his common assertion that Jesus existed despite the fact that almost everything else about the New Testament is unreliable -- as shown by his own research. I have to admit, however, that I haven't read his book on the subject -- Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth -- so I don't really know why he's so convinced that there was a real historical figure behind the myths.
The amount of forgery that took place in the early history of Christianity is really mind-boggling. Another excellent history of the subject is Forgery in Christianity: A Documented Record of the Foundations of the Christian Religion, by Joseph Wheless, who did a huge amount of research into what he calls "The Christian Forgery Mill." If you study this history together with the proliferation of Christian "heresies" at the time as well as the methods that were used to suppress them, you'll get a good idea of how the new religion actually evolved in the real world.
The Shroud of Turin is probably a medieval forgery. Radiocarbon 14 tests performed back in 1988 dated the shroud to AD 1260–1390, but as usual these results have been called into question. For example, in 2013 USA Today announced that "new scientific tests on the Shroud of Turin, which went on display Saturday in a special TV appearance introduced by the Pope, dates the cloth to ancient times, challenging earlier experiments dating it only to the Middle Ages."
Video from 2009. Closed-captions helpful.
When it comes to the dating of the shroud, all I can say is good luck trying to sort all this stuff out. If you aren't an expert on radiocarbon dating, you don't have a prayer of figuring out which tests, if any, were accurate, and the fact that the experts themselves can't agree would seem to call into question the value of radiocarbon dating in this particular case.
There are other ways to test the shroud's authenticity. For instance, if it could be shown that the "body of Jesus" had been painted on the fabric, that would prove that the shroud is a forgery. Some experts have argued that this could be the case, but to my knowledge no traces of pigment have been discovered so far. As pointed out in the top video, the fabric itself has been darkened through some unknown process.
The people who believe that the shroud is authentic think that the image was created by exposure to Jesus's body and/or blood. These believers can be divided into two general camps:
As far as I know, the Catholic Church hasn't actually come out and said that the shroud is authentic. But they haven't said that it's inauthentic, either. If you ask me, they're trying to cover themselves with their true believers while distancing themselves enough so that they won't lose credibility if somebody does manage to prove that the shroud is a fake.
The news anchor in the next video (2009) claims that the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin has been called into question because the shroud material doesn't match the material used in another shroud discovered in a Jerusalem tomb. This is an obviously spurious argument. After all, there's no reason why different fabrics couldn't have been used for burial shrouds back then.
Fortunately for those of us who want to get to the truth of the matter, it doesn't make any difference when or how the image on the shroud was created. Even if it's "authentic," i.e., even if the shroud dates back to the first century AD and the image was left on the fabric by contact with a human body, there's absolutely no way that anyone could ever prove that it was Jesus's body. After all, we don't know what he looked like. There are no written descriptions and nobody had cameras back then. The truth is that the image on the shroud, if it's for real, could have been left there by almost anyone.
It's a fake though. You can take that to the bank.
The myth of Hell can be traced all the way back to the first civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, but I'm guessing that the concept of an "underworld of the dead" had its origins in the earliest funerary religions of the Stone Age. The dead were buried under the earth, so the land of the dead was also seen as being somewhere underground.
Hell wasn't called Hell in Mesopotamia and it wasn't a place of punishment for sinners. That's a much more modern idea. Originally, the place we call Hell was just a grim vision of the afterlife waiting for everyone. In other words, back around 3,000 BC or so, everybody went to "Hell" so I guess you could say that Hell was the original Heaven:
"The Sumerian afterlife was a dark, dreary cavern located deep below the ground, where inhabitants were believed to continue 'a shadowy version of life on earth'. This bleak domain was known as Kur, and was believed to be ruled by the goddess Ereshkigal. All souls went to the same afterlife, and a person's actions during life had no effect on how the person would be treated in the world to come." Source: Wikipedia.
Closed-captions helpful. Sort of.
The Old Testament Sheol, also known as Hades, is basically identical to the Mesopotamian Kur. According to Wikipedia, "Sheol is a place of darkness to which all the dead go, both the righteous and the unrighteous, regardless of the moral choices made in life, a place of stillness and darkness cut off from life and from God."
The concept of an underworld where sinners are punished after death seems to have evolved in ancient Egypt and Greece, but several different versions of the myth were floating around the Near East and Mediterranean world back then.
The Greeks, for instance, had a concept of the underworld (Hades) as a "deep, gloomy place" where everyone went after death, but the element of judgment was also present in their mythology. " In the Gorgias, Plato (c. 400 BC) wrote that souls were judged after death and those who received punishment were sent to Tartarus," a pit or cave in Hades that was used as a dungeon. (Wikipedia) "Tartarus is the deep abyss that is used as a dungeon of torment and suffering for the wicked and as the prison for the Titans."
The next clip is from the great 1997 miniseries, The Odyssey, with Armand Assante (highly recommended). It starts off with the scene where Odysseus travels to Hades to ask the blind prophet Tiresias how to get home. The Hades in this scene is more of an underworld of shades than a place of divine punishment.
Hades was not only a place, but the name of the god of the underworld. Originally, he appears to have been one of many anonymous chthonic deities and it was dangerous to mention his actual name:
"...Hades lacked a proper name; as in the case of other nameless chthonians, his anonymity was a precaution. He was referred to by descriptive circumlocutions as 'chthonian Zeus' ... 'the chthonian god,' 'king of those below,' 'Zeus of the departed' ... 'the other Zeus,' 'the god below,' or simply 'lord.' As the Lord of the Dead, he was dark and sinister, a god to be feared and kept at a distance." Source: Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised).
The history of Hell and its demons is too long and complex to describe in detail here, but our modern concept of Hell apparently originated with the Abrahamic religions, particularly Christianity. From what I've read, Judaism sees Hell as a state of shame and atonement rather than a physical place. The full-blown description of Hell as a literal pit of fire and brimstone and eternal torment seems to be an invention of the medieval Christian church.
Interestingly enough, "[t]he Christian doctrine of hell derives from passages in the New Testament. The word hell does not appear in the Greek New Testament; instead one of three words is used: the Greek words Tartarus or Hades, or the Hebrew word Gehinnom (1)." So the Hell of the New Testament has clear roots in the underworld of the dead as described by the ancient Greeks and Mesopotamians.
(1) The word Gehinnom derives from Gehenna, a reference to the "Valley of Hinnom," a garbage dump outside of Jersualem where people burned their garbage. According to Wikipedia, "[b]odies of those deemed to have died in sin without hope of salvation (such as people who committed suicide) were thrown there to be destroyed. Gehenna is used in the New Testament as a metaphor for the final place of punishment for the wicked after the resurrection."
The valley is said to be cursed before some of the early kings of Judah sacrificed children to Moloch there.
These days, a majority of Americans still believe in Hell and a 2007 Harris poll revealed that more Americans believe in a literal Hell and Devil than they do in the theory of evolution. Some Christian denominations reject the concept of Hell altogether, while others still embrace the literal version of Hell famously described by Jonathan Edwards in his notorious 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
The full text of this sermon is a classic well worth reading.
Back in 2018, Pope Francis created a storm of controversy when he supposedly said that Hell doesn't exist and that condemned souls just disappear, though it's possible that his actual words were misreported. If Francis doesn't believe in Hell, he apparently still believes in demons, however, because the Vatican announced in the same year that it would hold a "training course for priests in exorcism ... amid claims that demands for deliverance from demonic possession have greatly increased across the world."
Comment: This is an interesting lecture. I can see the generational change he talks about in my own family. My grandparents were highly religious, my parents less so -- though still churchgoers -- and I'm probably the first outright atheist to come along in my family in a very long time. I might even be the first one, for all I know. Some of my relatives still pay lip-service to going to church, but the churches they belong to are of the Unitarian variety which don't really have any shared creed at all. None of my friends are religious in any way whatsoever. It's not something relevant in our lives.
In the United States, various forms of fundamentalist Protestantism are still thriving, religions like Islam are growing, and there's a fairly large New Age movement which has turned away from traditional Christianity altogether, but things have changed radically over the last century and for all practical purposes we live in an almost entirely secular society. The situation is even more dismal for religion in Europe, where Christianity is basically dead and the remaining churches are little more than Liberal/Socialist community organizations preaching the usual "progressive" gospel of self-destructive Cultural Marxism.
The same liberal disease has infected the more moderate Protestant denominations in the US, which seem to have turned into cults of social work and have been losing members for decades. As for the Catholic Church, it's been shaken repeatedly by corruption and pederasty scandals and the current Pope is just another Social Justice Warrior demanding that Europe open its borders to the immigrant invasion. Christianity is expanding into the Third World, but collapsing in the developed West, and the historical rise and fall of the religion is becoming very clear now.
Once it was established as the official state religion of the West, the Catholic church became so corrupt that it led to the first schisms as well as the rise of dozens of different "heresies." These heretical movements were a direct reaction to the orthodox church's worldliness and hypocrisy and had to be suppressed with torture and executions. For more information on the church's really incredible level of corruption back then, read the first chapter in A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, by Henry Charles Lea. Highly recommended.
Plagues, corruption and social decay undermined faith in the orthodox church, leading to the Reformation and eventually the Enlightenment. The schisms within the church continued over the centuries, setting off a chain-reaction of schisms within schisms which led to a proliferation of different denominations -- a process of institutional disintegration that was concealed for a while by the continued religiosity of the masses. But Christianity and religion in general couldn't survive the rise of science and the spread of secularism and rationalism that created the modern western world.
Religion is an archaic survival from thousands of years ago. Like the belief in magic, it's what we would now call a Third World or primitive way of interpreting reality. Spengler predicted that the final decline of the West would see a religious revival that he called the Second Religiousness. Many Spenglerians argue that the rise of Christian Fundamentalism fits the definition. If so, the surge in Fundamentalism with its gigantic megachurches is a sign of the West's terminal decline rather than its rejuvenation.
Spengler identified the West with Christianity in many ways -- he saw the great Gothic cathedrals as symbols of the spirit of western culture in its youth -- and he would have said that pre-Christian paganism was a feature of a completely different Classical world culture. Seen from a purely Spenglerian perspective, the New Age movement is yet another symptom of decline. Too muddled to be described as a real religion, too culturally alien to be a revival of an ancient tradition, the movement is a resurgence of the irrationality common to the masses of drifting Fellahin existing outside of history.
Whatever the case, religion has very little future here, at least for the time being. That could change, though. If these Third World invasions continue, I wouldn't be surprised if religion makes a comeback, just as various diseases thought to have been eradicated are making a comeback. This is where the lecturer in the first video gets it wrong, I think. Religion can make a comeback in the West, but if it does -- if these statistics regarding generational change and secularization reverse themselves -- it will be a sign that the demographics of the West have changed completely.
If that happens -- if religion makes a big comeback -- it will mean that the West no longer exists.
"The ruined church and monastic buildings that still stand on the island today are not Anglo-Saxon; they are the remains of the new priory built on the island in the late 11th century by the monks of Durham. So where is the original monastery? And what happened to it after the attack?" Source: DigVentures.
"All that is known to survive are some carved stone monuments of Anglo-Saxon date, which were found by archaeologists clearing away some of the collapsed rubble from the priory ruins in the late 19th and early 20th century."
Note: "... a major ... geophysical survey funded by National Geographic was carried out by Durham University in September 2012. This has shown that there is limited archaeological evidence for the monastic boundary that had previously been postulated, but an alternative boundary has been identified, which is associated with an area of possible industrial activity. It also identified a probably infirmary cloister associated with the later priory and a possible structure aligned on the two standing churches." Source: Durham University.
Video from 2019. The rest of the series can be found scattered around in this playlist.
"A rare copy of the medieval manuscript Invectives Against the Sect of Waldensians, which, alongside the later published Malleus Maleficarum, detailed how to recognize, question, torture and burn witches, is possibly being resurrected at the University of Alberta. The originally miscatalogued book is one of only four copies in the world, with the other three housed in libraries in France, Brussels, and Oxford, and is a stunning historical artifact." Source: The Malleusmaleficarum (2012).
Note: Technically, the Waldensians were considered to be heretics, not witches, but the distinction didn't matter to the author of Invectives:
"The Waldensians were medieval heretics who disavowed the power of the priests and allowed women to preach. But for the author of this book, Dominican inquisitor Johannes Tinctor, 'Waldensian' was a synonym for 'witch'."
Many of the Waldensian doctrines sound perfectly reasonable, but they challenged the Catholic church's authority and suffered really horrendous persecution for centuries as a result. For instance, the massacre described in the video below "became known as the Piedmont Easter. An estimate of some 1,700 Waldensians were slaughtered; the massacre was so brutal it aroused indignation throughout Europe." (Wikipedia)
"One year after a fire nearly destroyed the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the cause of the blaze remains a mystery.
"On April 15, 2019, the 850 year old gothic building was engulfed in flames, sending its iconic spire crumbling to the ground.
"Despite police initially asserting that an electrical short circuit was the probable cause of the fire, Europe Echaffaudage said that the electricity supply to the two lifts on the site 'was perfectly within specifications and well maintained.'
"12 months on and there is no official conclusion as to how the fire started." Source: Prison Planet.
Comment: It's hard to believe that a year's gone by and we still don't have any idea what caused this catastrophic fire, but the investigation (and restoration) have been delayed for a number of reasons. Apparently a lot of the donations pledged to fund the work never materialized and the investigation itself has been hampered by the fragility of the structure and the presence of toxic lead. According to ArtNet (April 15, 2020), "Experts still haven’t been able to gain access to the area where the blaze is believed to have begun, and that area will not be accessible until the scaffolding comes down," a job which could take months. And the coronavirus outbreak has caused even more delays.
Maybe the fire was accidental; maybe not. Attacks on churches by Muslims and radical leftist types were at an all-time high across Europe in 2019 and the announcement by the French government, on the day after the fire, that there was no sign of arson doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. Call me a cynic but I don't believe anything coming out of the Macron regime. The current theories that the fire was caused either by a cigarette or an electrical malfunction are probably all we'll ever get from official sources. I'm guessing that this was probably arson and I suspect that the investigation will just peter out as if nothing ever happened.
The execution of the Protestant scholar, William Tyndale, who was condemned for heresy, then strangled to death and burned at the stake in 1536 AD, tells me everything I need to know about the nature of the early Catholic church. It was a sadistic, totalitarian organization that maintained its grip on its flock through terror and mystification.
Tyndale, a leader in the Protestant Reformation, was condemned partly because he was the first to translate the Bible into English from the Greek and Hebrew texts. The King James Bible drew heavily on Tyndale's [partial?] translation. "One estimate suggests that the New Testament in the King James Version is 83% Tyndale's and the Old Testament 76%," according to Wikipedia.
Translating the Bible into English was something the Catholic church couldn't permit. If ordinary people could read the Bible for themselves Rome would lose its monopoly on the faith, not to mention a lot of its secular power, so the church had to make sure it controlled the message.
Translations of the Bible had to be carefully restricted and regulated. Latin versions were OK because only the churchmen and elites could read Latin, but the last thing the church wanted was an English version that the plebs might actually be able to understand and interpret for themselves. The first English translations of the New Testament had to be printed overseas and were apparently smuggled into England in bales of cotton. At the time, these were probably the most dangerous books in the world to possess. Note: Even possessing a Bible is still dangerous in some places.
During Tyndale's lifetime, Rome didn't want people being able to think for themselves. As far as the church was concerned, the best way to fleece the sheep was to keep them in a state of illiteracy, ignorance and passive obedience. It was a particularly insidious form of social control reinforced with bloody punishments for "heresy." Imagine living under a regime where you have to obey laws written in a language you can't understand. That's what the situation was like, but in the case of the medieval church lawbreakers not only faced burning at the stake but eternal damnation.
The church's policy was a form of mushroom management. It's no wonder that the peasants eventually revolted. The war for the English Bible was similar in some ways to Prohibition in America where high-quality booze -- the "real stuff" -- had to be smuggled into the country from Canada and the Caribbean. The church didn't have any more chance of containing the thirst for knowledge during the Reformation than the US government had of containing the thirst for liquor during Prohibition, and the democratization of knowledge exploded with the invention of the printing press:
"In the early days of the Reformation, the revolutionary potential of bulk printing took princes and papacy alike by surprise. In the period from 1518 to 1524, the publication of books in Germany alone skyrocketed sevenfold; between 1518 and 1520, Luther's tracts were distributed in 300,000 printed copies." (Wikipedia)
William Tyndale was a key figure in the war for the English Bible. The eventual publication of the King James Bible, based partly on Tyndale's work and authorized by the Church of England, itself a reaction against Catholic corruption, was a victory for free thought.
"Death was at the centre of life in the Middle Ages in a way that might seem shocking to us today. With high rates of infant mortality, disease, famine, the constant presence of war, and the inability of medicine to deal with common injuries, death was a brutal part of most people's everyday experience. As a result, attitudes towards life were very much shaped by beliefs about death: indeed, according to Christian tradition, the very purpose of life was to prepare for the afterlife by avoiding sin, performing good works, taking part in the sacraments, and keeping to the teachings of the church." Source: British Library. (Emphasis added)
Comment: From what I've read, the early Christian church was focused on the resurrection and the imminent return of Jesus -- the end of the world and the Final Judgment -- but as the years passed and it became obvious that the world wasn't going to end any time soon, the church shifted its emphasis to the inevitability of death and the nature of the afterlife. The focus on death was very useful because it terrified people into subservience to the church's teachings and authority, and the belief in Hell only reinforced the church's power. That's the common belief among atheists and secular humanists, at least.
I wonder how true this actually was for ordinary people in the Middle Ages. They were believers, but what exactly did they believe in? Until the Bible was first translated from Latin into a language they could understand, the mostly illiterate peasants probably didn't know much of anything about the books the church used as a basis for its authority. They were at the mercy of their priests when it came to understanding the teachings of their religion. But how much of this stuff about heaven and hell did they actually believe? Were they really so preoccupied with death and eternal punishment? Was death really the center of medieval life?
The medieval church was rife with superstitions, a problem that church authorities themselves had trouble dealing with. When you combine this with the fact that most people couldn't understand the Latin used by their priests, I would imagine that the medieval world had its share of skeptics and secret heretics. A peasant may be illiterate, but that doesn't mean that he or she is also gullible. I'm just speculating here, but I'd guess that a fair number of medieval Christians didn't take their priests too seriously. They may have believed in their religion in a vague kind of way, but for the most part they just got on with their lives the best they could and didn't spend every waking moment in terror of death and hell fire.
The Decline Of Religion In The West (Updated)
Comment: This is an interesting lecture. I can see the generational change he talks about in my own family. My grandparents were highly religious, my parents less so -- though still churchgoers -- and I'm probably the first outright atheist to come along in my family in a very long time. I might even be the first one, for all I know. Some of my relatives still pay lip-service to going to church, but the churches they belong to are of the Unitarian variety which don't really have any shared creed at all. None of my friends are religious in any way whatsoever. It's not something relevant in our lives.
In the United States, various forms of fundamentalist Protestantism are still thriving, religions like Islam are growing, and there's a fairly large New Age movement which has turned away from traditional Christianity altogether, but things have changed radically over the last century and for all practical purposes we live in an almost entirely secular society. The situation is even more dismal for religion in Europe, where Christianity is basically dead and the remaining churches are little more than Liberal/Socialist community organizations preaching the usual "progressive" gospel of self-destructive Cultural Marxism.
The same liberal disease has infected the more moderate Protestant denominations in the US, which seem to have turned into cults of social work and have been losing members for decades. As for the Catholic Church, it's been shaken repeatedly by corruption and pederasty scandals and the current Pope is just another Social Justice Warrior demanding that Europe open its borders to the immigrant invasion. Christianity is expanding into the Third World, but collapsing in the developed West, and the historical rise and fall of the religion is becoming very clear now.
Once it was established as the official state religion of the West, the Catholic church became so corrupt that it led to the first schisms as well as the rise of dozens of different "heresies." These heretical movements were a direct reaction to the orthodox church's worldliness and hypocrisy and had to be suppressed with torture and executions. For more information on the church's really incredible level of corruption back then, read the first chapter in A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, by Henry Charles Lea. Highly recommended.
Plagues, corruption and social decay undermined faith in the orthodox church, leading to the Reformation and eventually the Enlightenment. The schisms within the church continued over the centuries, setting off a chain-reaction of schisms within schisms which led to a proliferation of different denominations -- a process of institutional disintegration that was concealed for a while by the continued religiosity of the masses. But Christianity and religion in general couldn't survive the rise of science and the spread of secularism and rationalism that created the modern western world.
Religion is an archaic survival from thousands of years ago. Like the belief in magic, it's what we would now call a Third World or primitive way of interpreting reality. Spengler predicted that the final decline of the West would see a religious revival that he called the Second Religiousness. Many Spenglerians argue that the rise of Christian Fundamentalism fits the definition. If so, the surge in Fundamentalism with its gigantic megachurches is a sign of the West's terminal decline rather than its rejuvenation.
Spengler identified the West with Christianity in many ways -- he saw the great Gothic cathedrals as symbols of the spirit of western culture in its youth -- and he would have said that pre-Christian paganism was a feature of a completely different Classical world culture. Seen from a purely Spenglerian perspective, the New Age movement is yet another symptom of decline. Too muddled to be described as a real religion, too culturally alien to be a revival of an ancient tradition, the movement is a resurgence of the irrationality common to the masses of drifting Fellahin existing outside of history.
Whatever the case, religion has very little future here, at least for the time being. That could change, though. If these Third World invasions continue, I wouldn't be surprised if religion makes a comeback, just as various diseases thought to have been eradicated are making a comeback. This is where the lecturer in the first video gets it wrong, I think. Religion can make a comeback in the West, but if it does -- if these statistics regarding generational change and secularization reverse themselves -- it will be a sign that the demographics of the West have changed completely.
If that happens -- if religion makes a big comeback -- it will mean that the West no longer exists.
Related:
In US, Decline of Christianity Continues At Rapid Pace (Pew Research Center, 2019)
The Decline of Religion in American Family Life (American Enterprise Institute, 2019)
Three Decades Ago, America Lost Its Religion. Why? (The Atlantic, 2019)
The Decline of the Church in Europe (Catholic Standard, 2019)
Posted at 07:00 AM in Catholic Church, Christianity, Collapse, Commentary, Culture, Current Affairs, Religion, Videos | Permalink